What is valued as “fashion” has been historically structured through racial–colonial power, including within fashion studies. This article challenges the epistemological Eurocentrism of fashion scholarship through a decolonial research design. First, the project is co-led by a Muslim woman with expertise in counter-epistemologies, securing non-Eurocentric epistemic and interpretive authority within Muslim womanhood from project inception. Second, we undertake a theoretical reparation of Erving Goffman’s Eurocentric “body idiom,” reworking it through Black feminist intersectionality to develop the “intersectional body idiom”—a framework that renders Muslim women’s self-styling analytically legible beyond Eurocentric interpretive limits. Third, we deploy fashion as method, a participant-centred approach that fortifies participants’ interpretive authority. Drawing on visual and narrative material generated by nine young Muslim women in the UK, we identify three themes visible only through a decolonial research architecture: navigating intersectional embodiment, custodianship of precious and precarious dress heritages, and the joy of the dual wardrobe. We demonstrate what becomes knowable when epistemic sovereignty is designed into research, offering academia a decolonial architecture that restores authority to racialised publics usually studied by those insulated from racial–colonial harm.
Khan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.